Urban school reform in the United States is characterized by contentious, politicized debate. This course explores a set of critical issues in the education and educational reform space, with a focus on aspects of the field that have sparked controversy and polarized views. We will dig into these debates, situating them within the larger history of public education and school reform, and considering the viewpoints, the evidence, and translation of issues into educational policy.
We will consider three broad topics in this course:
1. Federal Strategies in School Reform: How has the federal government legislated and incented public school reform?
2. School Choice: How does school choice aim to improve schools?
3. Accountability: What is the history of accountability in American public schooling? What are the policies and practices associated with accountability?
Learning Goals
This course will enable participants to:
1. develop an informed historical perspective about public schooling in the United States;
2. understand the unique contextual elements of the American approach to public schooling;
3. analyze and assess divergent viewpoints about American public school history and school reform policy.
Teachers may be able to receive continuing education credit for successful completion of this course. To earn continuing education credits students must purchase and earn the Course Certificate, which they can then submit to the credit-issuing agency in their state. Students should also fill out the requisite paperwork stating that the affiliated provider is the Graham School at the University of Chicago, and that average time for certificate-level course completion is 18 hours. Students outside of Illinois should contact their state’s accreditation board to determine whether this course is eligible for continuing education credit. Note that it is up to the schools or districts that employ teachers to decide whether this course meet their requirements.

Revisiones

DJ

Great course with great information to help me in my daily job but also with my non-profit and community advocacy work.

FM

Mar 12, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Enjoyable course with manageable requirements. Great ability to access the information around a busy schedule.

De la lección

Interlude 1: Interview and Panel Discussion on NCLB and CCSS

We had the pleasure of interviewing several experts in the education space from around Chicago and the Urban Education Institute. Listen as they discuss topics surrounding NCLB and CCSS. They will have a variety of perspectives from that of a researcher to a practitioner. Which do you identify with? Did any of the participants resonate with you?

Impartido por:

Sara Ray Stoelinga

Transcripción

[MUSIC] Well, so I think you have to break down the resistance to the Common Core. Some of the resistance is just really, sort of Democrat, Republican politics. You know, this was an Obama initiative, so let's paint it in the worst possible way for purely political reasons. But then there's the other question about, well, what are the standards asking? What are they demanding of kids? And how can we get there? So I think that some of the objections we're seeing come from both sorts of thinking. I think probably the most sort of rhetorical bombastic push back is just political, it's because it came from the Obama Administration so it has to be bad. But then I think there are also people thinking through, you know, is this the best way we can do it? Can we do it this quickly? How do we get the other pieces in place? Where do we get the resources, the supports, all the work that it will take to make it? I mean the outcome, I can't imagine that anybody can disagree. We've got to ratchet up our kids educational experiences and their learning, and we're just going to fall behind if we don't. We hear this sort of daily we need more people in STEM and this more demanding expectations, which is going to take different kind of instruction. It's going to take different kinds of supports and resources. I don't think there can be much disagreement with that. The question is how to get there. >> I think what's important is for state policy leaders and local school district leaders to be very upfront with their communities about the fact that these changes are going to actually result in lower scores, likely. And that's to be expected, and that's okay. And that we're sort of resetting the clock on this. But I think if you're a parent and you're in a community and you hear that, I think one could immediately say, so we were being lied to for a long time by this system that was set up here in this state. And you might be a different state superintendent, or you might be a different local school district superintendent, but I don't really get that. To me this is causing me to really distrust the system, and I think that's an understandable conclusion for them to be reaching. So while I do think the best thing is to be very upfront and clear, there has to be a recognition that people are going to be very skeptical of whether or not this is an accurate reflection of what their students are learning or how their school district is performing. And that there won't be another effort to be gaming this system in other ways, so I think that's always a problem. >> In the education reform movement as of late, I think people accept that black and brown students haven't been doing well or that low income students of any ethnicity haven't been doing that well in school. I think people realize that. They're not okay with it, but they realize that's the status. I think Common Core might point out that wow, there's a lot more that we need to do, across all neighborhoods, to really prepare young people to be as effective in school as they could be. That's going to be the type of backlash that you might not be prepared for. A conversation about what seemed to be a high performing school before, might not be such a high performing school anymore. And the parents that were sending their children there were expecting that this was a top notch institution. How prepared are we to have those conversations? How comfortable are we? How much political capital do we have? I think it also depends on, can we commit to this new initiative, and stick to our guns? It's going to be 12 to 16 years for us to be able to see if Common Core, implemented correctly, has the type of outcomes that we want. If we've got a group of people both at the state House level, the national level, and at the local level who are willing to withstand the political and public pressure about lower outcomes on test scores for now, I think there's a possibility. >> Leadership becomes really important in terms of states that are going to be successful implementing the Common Core. I think you're going to have talented bold leaders that are going to say, parents deserve this. And I really do get most excited about this conversation when you start to think about it from a parent's perspective. You don't want to have your kids graduate from high school and think they're ready for college or career, and then not be prepared as effectively as they could be. Part of that can sometimes be the lowering of a cut score on a state test or some other similar activity, so it's like getting the communication message, right, that our kids deserve this and they all need to be taught to higher standards in a way that's compelling for parents, is a key part of it. I think a second key strategy that we're seeing leading states implement, is getting their educators involved in the conversation. And I always tend to be most moved when teachers and principals stand up and say, this new curriculum is really important and really better than what we've been teaching. And here's how we're going to implement it successfully. And so when you get that conversation going, I think you're moving in the right direction. But when it's the political conversation that's about, this is not what our kids need to know, or look how much our schools are going to start failing compared to how they've been doing before, that you get into trouble. >> US students have not performed particularly well on international quote unquote standards of educational assessment. Finland, Australia, you know, bunch of countries continue to sort of beat us as a country. And so we need to figure out a way to develop a system that ensures that more of our kids are able to sort of compete well within that particular space. I mean, I get and understand that Common Core is not a direct reaction to TIMS or some of the other international assessments, but for the most part I don't see any other reasonable reason to have a national standard. If you're okay with the fact that this country continues to produce tons and tons of individuals who are both well educated, innovative, transformative in the different practices that they engage in, and you know that we have perhaps one of the best higher education systems in the world. And it's like, I continue to wonder, really, what is the fundamental problem in terms of this notion of Common Core? >> At the end of the day, to get standards and assessments, right? I mean, the theory is set standards up here, nice and high. And build an assessment that is actually fairly measures the extent to which kids have actually achieved those standards. In the middle is a huge thing, and that is the classroom and the schoolhouse, and the quality of teaching and the quality of professional development. The extent to which the schoolhouse is an interesting place for adults, as well as children, to learn, none of that is touched by an assessment and standards regime. None of it. And so, the true test, and the places that rise and shine, are the places that are going to think very intentionally about, what does it actually mean for teachers to teach to a very, very different standard? What does that actually require and what kind of coaching, what kind of professional development, what kind of observations of other great teachers do they need? What kind of leaders do we need who can actually help teachers get to that higher standard? That's what's going to distinguish the districts, and potentially states, that do this well. And if you look across the globe, that's what distinguishes the highest performing countries in the world, is that they're being very, very intentional about the quality of the support and development of the people in these places called schools. >> Here, the schools are going to be held accountable to these tests that are really untested tests. We don't know how students are going to perform and we don't have a lot of evidence about what teachers need to do to get all students to perform well on these tests. On the other hand, if you don't have the test in place, then it's going to be hard to motivate people to change their instructional practices in a way that's going to get students to have the skills that are tested by the tests. So I guess it's a chicken and the egg kind of thing. And so because of that uncertainty, there's a lot of concern out there about what's going to happen when students actually take these tests. And that's in part because we have these accountability systems that are so strongly tied to tests. So we don't have flexibility for figuring things out. We don't any wiggle room. We don't have a time for testing and improving. And, whenever you have a new system, you know things are going to go wrong, things always go wrong. There are always going to be unexpected consequences, and yet the system isn't designed to allow for that process of improvement, and figuring it out, and making it work. >> There are some states, who want to use an assessment, that has never really been used in full scale to judge schools, to judge teachers' performance based on a task that's new, untested. We don't know how valid and reliable it is. Not created for that purpose. And so that is to me, that's misguided, misinformed. And people have realistic and real fears about that. So that's part of the accountability. If there was a way to say, okay, we're going to give a new assessment based on these new standards and there's not going to be decision-based, a high stakes decision for a child, a teacher, a school, that would be made on the basis of that, that would go a long way to settling some of the concern. We have two testing companies that are creating the tests that will test the Common Core state standards. I think it's a major mistake, because once again, and I don't know what it is, I mean I guess it's our, maybe it comes from root of our two party system. We have to have the Republicans and Democrats. We have to have the ACT and the SAT. We have to have Coke and Pepsi. We have to have, like I guess we just think as a country in groups of two like this, but this one where I would rather have had us have one test. As a highschool principal, I would communicate with people, other principals whose students took the ACT. And I would say, how did your students do on the ACT? ay students are this and that. What you're working on? But I could have a meaningful conversation about their achievement on an important measure that would get them into college with people in New York and Los Angeles, right? Like the West Coast and the East Coast because they were SAT states. So, that's ridiculous. We live in the same country, I should be able to call up a principal in LA or in San Francisco or a principal in New York and say. How did your students do? Here's how my students did. It just has to happen, and by, now here we go, one of the major problems with the old system has now been replicated with the new system. >> I think there were challenges in terms of how one actually tries to to procure assessments that are going to be applicable to many states. And I don't think that the federal government really had an appreciation for how difficult it was going to be for states across the country to be able to actually try to purchase assessments that were being developed by some other organization that was working on this and not have competitive processes to actually bid all of this out. So there are very complicated state laws that make doing a lot of what you think would be simple and would make sense very, very difficult. So that's certainly an issue. And then you have the problem with the assessments where we're already in an environment that teacher evaluations are going to now incorporate student growth. And you have these new assessments that the federal government and therefore the states are looking to see come online very soon. And the teachers haven't been able to fully incorporate the Common Core into what they're teaching their students. And so I think they have a legitimate fear that now all of the sudden, these test scores are going to become so critical in terms of my evaluation and by extension, my employment, and I don't have a chance to really prepare my students in the right way for them, and that's going to be reflected in their scores. So there are all these different policy issues and various state structures that are at play in trying to actually just see that assessments are going to be developed, that are going to be able to measure these new standards which just make sense. But it's not just as easy as that. >> So the opportunity is that these assessments could actually drive a different kind of learning if there's legitimate accountability attached to them. However, if past is prologue, what we see states doing, time and time again, is two things. One is they go with the cheap assessment. So they buy the cheap multiple choice test, because they can't afford the hard, more rigorous, more interesting, more labor-intensive to grade, essay question type assessment. So, we see this again and again and again across our country that there we sort of dumb down these tests until they cost $0.32 cents per student to administer and score, and then we can look at the number as it goes up and down, regardless of whether has an impact on the child's long term prospect. The second thing that happens is that states like to tinker with the cut scores. So again, we've seen this again and again and again, that states maintain control. To go back to the beginning part of your conversation, states have control. They have local control over were they set things like cut scores. So I think if past is prologue, we can probably predict that the states will do that, that not enough kids will be proficient for whatever, whoever is in the office, and they'll lower the bar so as to be able to declare success. >> I think it will continue to fracture, and I'm sad about that for the reasons that I've already said. I think that it is not okay. I think it's not okay to allow the potential of children to be lost, because I don't want to hold them accountable for hard things. I think we should. If I want my children, the children of my school or district or state to perform well on an international stage, then we need to step it up, and their parents need to step it up, and the community needs to step it up. These standards are one way of discovering whether the children in my school, my community, my state, whether all of those children are able to be productive adults on a global stage. And if I am afraid to take that heat, then I think I am doing a disservice to all of those children. >> I think all the energy and effort that went into a lot of the things around the Common Core, Suggest it is frankly a better assessment of where we think people need to be in the 21st century than some of these other assessments. There are numerous cases of many of these assessments being reasonably half baked in order to get decent results. I mean it's a numbers game, right? It's not really about, does this assessment prove that students are able to be successful in the things that we want them to be successful? Common core has a little bit more connection to, these are actually life skills that are important. And so the folks in New York who are upset that their kids are doing poorly on the Common Core standards assessments should wonder what's going on in their schools to prepare them for life in the 21st century. >> I have for decades, and I've never really understood when people are talking about assessments and they're talking about high standards, they talk in the abstract. Why don't we get concrete? And talk about what it is we expect the kids to do in math, what it is that we expect them to do in their literacy instruction. Why is writing a good essay important? Why is it important to have some of these higher order skills? I just wish there were more conversation about what the actual meat of this is and I'm surprised, I hear test scores get reduced to numbers. The numbers don't mean anything to us. We've gotta be talking about what are the expectations for kids in terms of what the actual content is. And I would just love to hear more of that. And I think people are afraid that nobody cares about that. They don't care what kind of science learning kids need to have. But that's what its all about and I think that we could easily turn the conversation to get much more focus done, the kinds of skills we're actually talking about. Why they're important for kids, why they're important for our economy, why they're important for innovation. [MUSIC]